The Great War and the Christmas Truce
by Greekhoop
Summary: After the fall of Outer Heaven, Ocelot comes in from the cold. Ocelot/Eva. Written for MGS Secret Santa 2011.


**The Great War and the Christmas Truce**

After Eva heard about the fall of Outer Heaven, she waited in Prague for something to happen. No sense moving until she had a plan, she told herself. No sense doing anything until she knew what had to be done. Eva had always been good at following orders; so good, in fact, that there had been little cause or opportunity during her life for her to decide things for herself.

In the weeks after she learned of Jack's death, she was paralyzed with uncertainty. She did not mourn him in any outward, overt way: not with the tears and lamentations he surely deserved but would not have wanted. Rather, she felt her once-sharp mind becoming clouded with doubts and worries. Her instincts dulled from repeatedly bashing their honed edges against the blunt rock face of her regret.

When Adamska finally arrived for her, it was not a moment too soon.

The snow was falling soft and steady on the night that he came. Eva had left the curtain on her bedroom window open a crack, feeling bold and reckless in doing so, as if she were inviting the bullets of a hundred hidden snipers. The streetlight outside cast shadows of falling flakes against the wall, so that even the snow had become black.

Earlier that evening, Lieutenant Trinh, her second in command ever since Hanoi, had come up to Eva's apartment with a sly and secretive smile on her usually dour hard-line Marxist face.

"Merry Christmas, _danh tu_," she declared, thrusting a package wrapped in newspaper into Eva's hand.

Eva had been shocked. She had, in fact, forgotten the date entirely.

Trinh hadn't stayed long after that. The simple act of handing over the gift seemed to have utterly exhausted her sociable intentions. After she was gone, Eva sat at the little table and fingered the leather holster Trinh had given her. It was hung on a cartridge belt that was still stiff with newness. The holster itself was decorated with elaborate leatherwork, a pattern of roses on the vine. All of the fittings were made of hammered silver.

It must have been expensive, even on an officer's salary, but Trinh was a devout Buddhist in addition to a sober Communist, and she did not drink or go on leave with the other soldiers under Eva's command. All the same, she must have been saving for months to buy it. And then there would have been the volatile black market to deal with. Eva could not imagine why Trinh had gone to all the trouble when no one else had, not in a long time.

Now, don't start that, Eva thought. No sense crying over missed opportunities now. She thought about mixing herself a drink, but in the end it seemed a lot of effort to get up and get the bottle of gin from inside her desk. Besides, hadn't she been hitting it a little too hard lately? She wasn't as young as she used to be, but her body still had some good firm years left in it if the sedentary life of a sleeper agent didn't get her first.

She had to admit, though, she didn't heal like she used to. Eva could remember Groznyj Grad and the wounds she'd received escaping. She had not admitted it for a long time, not even to herself, but for a few minutes she'd really thought, for the first time, that she would die. Jack had patched her up, though. He'd set her on her feet, and somehow she had stayed up.

But it was better if she didn't think about Jack right now.

Deciding she might prefer a drink after all, Eva set the holster aside and stood up. Before she could make a move, however, there was a knock on the door. It came in the familiar short-long-short-long pattern that was the code agreed upon by Eva and her troops, but she could tell it was not one of hers who was standing outside.

Eva snatched her Mauser from its place on the dresser, chambering a round as she crossed the floor with soundless steps. She came at the door from an angle, standing off to one side and well clear of the line of fire as she popped open the lock, turned the knob, and let the door swing inward.

"Easy, Tanya, easy."

Eva recognized the voice at once, but it did not make her want to lower her gun.

Slowly, Adamska stepped inside. His spurs clicked dryly; his hands were raised to the level of his shoulders, but Eva could tell by the loose and easy way he held himself that he only meant it as a kind of ironic joke.

With a sigh, she dropped the Masuer to her side. "So, you finally decided to show up."

"I came as soon as I could."

Tiring of his little game, Adamska lowered his hands. He slipped one into the inside pocket of his coat and brought forth a bottle of whiskey. Eva's eyes were on it as soon as it appeared. "What's that for?"

"I'll tell you later," Adamska said. "First, glasses."

This wasn't the time to argue with him. Eva brought the glasses out from the cabinet behind her desk. The shots Adamska poured for them were just one finger short of a hand.

He handed Eva a glass and said, "To him."

Eva felt her throat snap shut at the words. It opened again to allow the whiskey down, and after a moment she felt like she could talk again. "What the hell happened, Adamska? You were there. Why didn't you do your job?"

"Adamska?" He smiled ruefully. "Practically no one knows me by that name anymore."

"There's one less now," Eva said pointedly, hoping that she had hurt him. If she had, he never let it show.

"There is. He's dead. There was no helping it." Before Eva could respond, he poured for them again. The bottle was noticeably depleted.

The second shot seemed to sap all the strength out of her, and Eva gripped the edge of the table, lowering herself into the chair. Adamska, like a gentleman, pretended he had not seen. He was suddenly very interested in the leather holster that Eva had left sitting out. He held it up, tracing the rose pattern with one gloved finger.

He had aged, Eva thought. Here he was, not even fifty, and already his blond hair was shot through with gray, already his face was lined and worn by an accumulation of difficult living. But his body was still lean and hard and upright; his eyes were still steely blue. This was still the man that Jack had chosen to keep at his side.

She felt a hot hard knot rise in her throat, like whiskey in reverse. Now was no time for jealousy, she told herself bitterly. Adamska was practically the only ally she had left.

Adamska had gone over the same patch on the holster about half a dozen times. He was trying to work himself up to say something, but he was going to need a few more drinks before he could muster the courage. Jack had been clever enough to keep them separated most of the time, but Eva still felt like she knew Adamska well. She'd always kept a close eye on enemies, and rivals.

"What do we do now?" she asked quietly.

Adamska's head came up sharply at those words. He set the holster back down, the leather cartridge belt hissing as it snaked through his gloved fingers to coil on the table.

"We…" he echoed, as if he had not understood.

"Yes," Eva said. "We. As in both of us. You don't think I'm going to give up or lose interest, just because he—"

"He's not dead," Adamska blurted out suddenly.

Eva did not say anything. It was as if Adamska had suddenly reverted to a language she did not know or he was now speaking in a code she could not break. She waited patiently for him to go on.

"He was killed," Adamska said slowly. "Killed. But not dead. Zero put him down, down… A slab of meat. A piece of government property for them to dissect and dispose of at their leisure."

His eyes narrowed, and when he spoke next his voice had grown bitter. "He was a great man. And they're doing those things to him. All for his genes. All for property. And he knows it's happening. I know that he knows. I can't… I couldn't…"

Adamska's expression twisted with distaste, as if he no longer had words for the things going through his head, as if he doubted such words could even exist without him to put voice to them.

"You couldn't save him at Outer Heaven," Eva said calmly. "So you want to save him now."

Adamska looked away, embarrassed. "Something like that."

Thoughtfully, Eva poured another round of whiskey. Adamska was not talking now, not making much noise at all, and so she had only the rhythm of her own thoughts.

_He loves me… He loves me not… He loves me… He loves me not…_

"Here," Eva said in disgust, nudging Adamska's glass towards him.

They drank for a while in formal silence. Then the whiskey was gone, and Eva rose without a word to fetch her bottle of gin. Her stomach lurched when she stood up, and her head felt light. Her face and her fingers tingled with distant numbness.

She knew that Adamska was just as drunk as she was. For all his tough-guy posturing, he didn't drink often, and when he did it was sparingly, more for show than for pleasure. He'd put away a lot tonight, though. Nursing his poor broken heart, his savage guilt, his mighty burden he had carried all the way from Zanzibar Land.

Eva did not hate him, and indeed she could not remember a time when she had. She did not think Adamska hated her, either. Though, she noted with bitter pride, it did cause him some pain to have to respect a woman.

The gin was about halfway gone. The bottle clinked brightly, brittly, when Eva set it down on the table. Adamska raised his eyes briefly to hers, then he picked up the bottle and they resumed where they had left off.

Eva felt herself sinking into drunkenness. Leaving behind her inscrutability and her poise. Adamska did not look much different to her, but it seemed that he, too, had let his mask slip out of weary carelessness. Until that moment, it had not occurred to Eva that Adamska might have entered into her life no more than she had entered into his. That he might have his own secrets, and desires, and sad concealments.

"Adamska," she said quietly. She had slipped a little in her chair, and now she was leaning over the table with her temple resting on her arm. She watched the play of light through the glass in her hand. "Do you remember when we…?"

That got his attention. His head came up quick, and he made a fumbling attempt to put his expression back into some semblance of cool disinterest. "When we what?"

"You know," Eva replied. She was glad her head was down, and that her hair hid her smile. "That time with Jack."

"Oh, _that_," Adamska said with exaggerated carelessness. "Jack was pretty insistent, wasn't he? He was always good at being persuasive." When this did not seem to have conveyed his innocence sufficiently, he tried again, "We were just kids."

"Speak for yourself," Eva said. "You may have been just a boy, but I was a grown woman."

Adamska frowned. "So what?"

"Nothing," Eva said. "Just thinking, that's all."

She shook the now nearly-empty gin bottle, and poured out the rest of it in two full shots. She took hers, and it felt as hot and heavy on the way to her stomach as the first gulp of whiskey had, though the whiskey seemed like a long time ago now.

"Where are you going to stay tonight?" she asked.

"I haven't given it any thought," Adamska said.

"Stay here. I'll tell the troops about you in the morning. It's late right now, and they've earned some rest." They also didn't need to see her drunk, but Eva kept that much to herself.

Adamska's brow furrowed thoughtfully. It was a long time before he moved to speak, though perhaps it had not seemed that long to him. "Do you want me to stay so that we can… do that thing you mentioned? Again, I mean."

Eva was startled into laughter. "Oh, Adamska…" And then, reminding herself of his touchy pride, and how she might do well to cultivate it if they were going to be allies from now on, she quickly added, "I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you."

"I know." He reached across the table, his gloved hand knocking first off the empty gin bottle, then off the leather holster before it found her fingertips. "It's not something I've given much thought, not in a long time. In general, I mean. Not specifically… you. Or Jack."

Eva nodded, understanding. Though they both had the steely hardness of field agents, she had an additional layer of soft gauze over that, the softness she had cultivated during her younger years where the missions had come in, one after another: Seduce-and-Terminate, Gather Intelligence, Insinuate into Enemy Ranks.

People came to her with their secrets, and she did not mind. She always kept them, unless she had orders otherwise, and she would keep Adamska's, too. Whatever he chose to reveal to her.

"I haven't either," Eva soothed, turning in his grip so that she could pat his hand. Poor naive Adamska, she thought with an obscure melancholy. So innocent that he did not even know his own innocence for what it was.

All at once, he grabbed her wrist and, in a fit of tender violence, jerked her hand to his lips.

Eva watched him calmly. His eyes were closed now, and his long hair fell in two colorless curtains on either side of his face.

"The time for vengeance will come," Eva said. Adamska's eyes flew open, and he stared at her down the length of her arm. "I promise you, he'll have justice."

He did not reply. Eva got up and went to the window, where she faced the cold and snowy bleakness of Christmas Eve. With a decisive movement of her hand, she drew the curtains against it.

~The End


End file.
